Darkness of Futures Past

taken by me

glasgow, scotland

Remembering what I said about the original work "haunting" found-language works, I point to an example here. The final line ("You Come Too") comes from the wiki page for Robert Frost, and is referencing a tender and serene poem "The Pasture" in which the speaker is inviting the listener to come with them to clear the pasture spring and fetch the little calf, a request of pure companionship in an activity that is routine necessity but leisurely.

It's a very different tone, isn't it? Many interpretations of the final line are possible, but if it is understood that "The Pasture" is the context it came from, the final line is an invitation.

It was very interesting to me to source my last line from something so calm and peaceful when the rest of the poem is filled with imagery of horror.

As part of "Monster," the line becomes more firm and has a sort of foreboding but it does not lose its reassuring nature. This is because the rest of the poem expresses the necessity of monsters to intervene in the gaps that separate us from recognizing the horrors and traumas within ourselves and the world around us. The monster itself is an invitation, to confront the difficult parts of ourselves and the world that may otherwise be impossible to truly realize. "You come too. Come acknowledge this reality with me. You come too, be liberated by the monster."

Wikipedia is a non-fictional source, so most of the quotations are nonfictional in nature. I mostly preserve the non-fictional tone of Wikipedia in these poems, allowing the words to generally retain the echo of their purpose of defining and providing information about a topic. Wikipedia is also a living document being constantly edited and re-written, so the wording shown in these poems often has changed in contemporary versions of the Wikipedia pages.